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He never released anything to the public. Someone who didn't like his political views leaked it to Twitter and the press. If I were him, I would have personal

• pjc50 6y ago
  .. so you'd destroy their life instead?
  • StephenAmar 6y ago
    Always assume that what you say could be on the front page of the New York Times.
    • CydeWeys 6y ago
      This is literally part of Noogler orientation at Google, word for word, and I'm sure at many other companies too. I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.
      • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
        Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.
        • CydeWeys 6y ago
          Not sure how that's relevant here. He published under his real name, at work.
          • dane-pgp 6y ago
            Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity." A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting. Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address. A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company... Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed. From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.
            • CydeWeys 6y ago
              From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.
    • pjc50 6y ago
      Indeed. Never assume that anything you write at work on a work computer won't be seen by your manager or used against you. Even if it's supposedly confidential correspondence with HR or protected labour organisation, and theoretically illegal for them to access. Even if it's personal info under GDPR. And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list. (I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")
    • banads 6y ago
      And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.
      • jlebar 6y ago
        Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.
        • hackissimo123 6y ago
          The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.
          • jlebar 6y ago
            And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?
            • hackissimo123 6y ago
              Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?) For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.
              • jlebar 6y ago
                Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan. I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did. Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?
    • humanrebar 6y ago
      I'll point out that this aphorism concedes that certain categories of interesting discussion are not possible, and it's a little neutral about that prospect for my taste. It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        All sorts of discussion aren't possible unless the participants can be sure that the others are acting in good faith and not likely to engage in needless hostility or reprisals outside the discussion. The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
        • atq2119 6y ago
          I would rephrase that to say that "safe space" should be the term for such environments, but in practice that's problematic. The term was specifically invented to describe spaces where certain discussions are forbidden because they could be "triggering". It was not invented to describe a space where discussion is possible without unilateral escalation to unrelated third parties. I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
        • kortilla 6y ago
          No, “safe space” has long been taken over to indicate spaces where people can be without worrying about being exposed to an idea that triggers a sensitive area for them regardless of intent or good faith.
    • roenxi 6y ago
      Engineering is where most of the people go who care more about being right than about what people think of them. There is a reason for that - it usually matters if an approach is right or not in engineering work. Companies like Google need to be able to roll their eyes when engineers start stupid arguments, not sack them. The front-page rule is a technical impediment to people being able to figure out facts. The path to the truth often leads through patches of believing things that are wrong. Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible. Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".
      • wpietri 6y ago
        This wasn't emacs vs vi. Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way. Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption. You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.
        • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
          Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot. It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.
    • tootie 6y ago
      Consider the recent kerkuffle with the CEO of Away. She didn't tread on any political or cultural landmines. Just decided to treat her workers like shit and do it on open Slack channels.
    • afiori 6y ago
      While this is a good advice, it is a terrible response after the fact.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • spamizbad 6y ago
    Outcomes like this inevitable when capital has a concentration of power and labor is not organized. Damore is a self-described classic liberal so I assume he’s fine with this arrangement.
• threatofrain 6y ago
  That’s like suing people for telling others that you’re gay. That’s a standard of liability people would never rally behind, one which prevents you from speaking truthfully at the cost of another person.
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    Not quite. He didn't write the memo to say he's a misogynist or a political conservative. He wrote a memo implying the women who worked with him may not be as competent as the men. Now replace "women" with any other group, such as people of color, Jews, armed forces veterans or Republicans, and see how it goes.
    • threatofrain 6y ago
      I’m talking about the liability of somebody sitting in the same context, wanting to talk about it.
      • rbanffy 6y ago
        If someone distributes a memo that's likely to alienate half of their colleagues, the first thing I'll question is their lack of judgement. If he was uncertain about hiring policies and thought those were negatively affecting productivity, he should have taken the question to his manager or to HR, along with some evidence.
        • threatofrain 6y ago
          I’m talking about the liability of people sitting in the same context. Are you still talking about what James should or shouldn’t be doing? I’m talking about whether you should incur legal risk for leaking facts about people likes James.
          • rbanffy 6y ago
            If he wrote that on a memo and distributed it to a dozen colleagues, it's doubtfully a secret. If he were fired for being gay, that'd be against the law on pretty much every civilized country and a couple that wouldn't qualify.
• ABeeSea 6y ago
  He failed the green eggs and ham test for written communication at work. >Would you like this in the press? >Would you like this at Brand X? >Like to read it on the stand? >Like it in the government's hand? https://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2006/12/over_at_white_c.html https://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2006/12/over_at_white_...
  • ALittleLight 6y ago
    I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.
    • dralley 6y ago
      I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.
      • jhhh 6y ago
        I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.
        • dralley 6y ago
          This article cites two of them and goes into some of the places where Damore made unjustified leaps in logic. https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... Here is another that is more detailed but doesn't talk mention individual scientist opinions https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/ https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...
          • 6y ago
• lonelappde 6y ago
  Damore was character assassinated via leaks and libel, yes. Pragmatically, he could have prevented his fate if he took the opportunity to back down when challenged by corporate, instead of defending his right to free honest speech at a megacorp. He erroneously thought that because controversial party-line free-speech was job-safe even when intellectually dishonest, that controversial anti-party-line free speech was also job-safe.
  • rbanffy 6y ago
    The character assassination weapon was his own memo and opinions, stated over and over by himself. It's character suicide.
    • oh_sigh 6y ago
      The repeated false claims about statements in the memo and abbreviated versions shared don't count as character assassination?
    • afiori 6y ago
      except for the fact that almost all controversial statements attributed to the memo are projections. In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.
      • shadowgovt 6y ago
        That would have been a great thing for the memo to say. That's not what the memo said. Instead, the memo claimed women were on average more neurotic.
        • afiori 6y ago
          Neuroticism is is a personality trait, others are Obsessionality, Psychoticism, Disinhibition, Impulsivity, Rigidity, Alexithymia, Perfectionism, Sensory processing sensitivity, Novelty seeking, Harm avoidance, Self-esteem, Honesty-humility, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience. I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other. Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse. The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender. We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.
• wpietri 6y ago
  Sued them for what, exactly? Quoting a document Damore circulated to thousands of people? Being honest isn't generally a crime. I'll note that you've just imagined the "intention of destroying a person's life" bit. There were plenty of reasons for releasing that that have nothing to do with Damore. Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.
  • Infinitesimus 6y ago
    > Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it. Not sure I agree. There is no big tech corporation in current America where having your name tied to a memo like that won't destroy your career within the company l. Damore certainly should have expected that if leadership disagreed with him, he was in for a bad time. However, he still is within reasonable bounds to go after whoever leaked the internal memo externally regardless of whether or not you agree with the content.
    • wpietri 6y ago
      Go after them for what? In America, you can't just sue people for "you told the truth" or "my own words made me look bad and its your fault".
      • mdorazio 6y ago
        In America you can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether you will win or not is another matter, but if you've never been to jury duty the court system is absolutely packed with cases that seem absurd. In this instance, it would be perfectly plausible to sue for something like emotional distress.
        • wpietri 6y ago
          One can file a case, sure. But even to get to discovery, let alone trial, the suit has to be about something for which one can actually sue. Emotional distress can be a factor in damages, but a judge would instantly throw out a case whose only basis was, "The bad man hurt my feelings." If people here are just saying Damore should just harass people by file frivolous lawsuits that will quickly be thrown out, then fine, let them say that. But the theory that there's legitimate grounds for a lawsuit that could actually succeed is ridiculous.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Publishing to that many people and expecting it to remain private is folly of such a high kind that it borders on stupidity.
  • afiori 6y ago
    I do not think that all feedback ever sent to the google diversity team had been made public.
• lliamander 6y ago
  Also, he shared his memo with HR (at their request) long before he shared it with his colleagues. If Google was going to have an objection to what he wrote, that would have been the appropriate time.